Suchergebnisse

Renewed interest in ballistic missile defense (BMD) must be seen against the background of technical, strategic, and political uncertainties. Technically a shift in emphasis from traditional to exotic technologies involves many uncertainties. While these may be resolved in the future, any such system will have to be extremely leakproof to offer an attractive defense of cities. Strategically BMD can have destabilizing consequences if not coupled with severe constraints on offensive forces; in particular, unbridled BMD competition could provide incentives for either superpower to strike the other first in a crisis. Politically the most salient consideration is the ABM Treaty of 1972; any move by the United States that seems to call its commitment to the treaty into question will raise political opposition domestically and among U.S. allies, and suspicions in the USSR. Future prospects may be enhanced if the United States makes clear that it has no intention of revising the treaty; moves ahead with offensive arms limitations; and reorients its BMD focus to the marginal role of defending retaliatory forces that remain after a period of offensive arms limitations.

The basis of NATO deterrence strategy is the manipulation of the nuclear "threshold." When NATO's conventional component is strong and the exact nature of its nuclear threshold is uncertain to Warsaw Pact countries, NATO's deterrent will be strong. Attempts to improve the "quality" of the nuclear arsenal by making the outcome of nuclear conflict more predictable weaken NATO's deterrent power. It is the possibility that NATO may use nuclear weapons, as well as the uncertainty of the consequences of such use, that strengthens the deterrent. The number of nuclear weapons in the NATO arsenal could be reduced with no appreciable damage to the deterrent posture. Qualitative improvements in the conventional component, while increasing deterrent strength, also serve as safeguards in case of deterrence failures. To the extent that political unity within NATO increases the predictability of a NATO response to Warsaw Pact aggression, it is possible that political disunity actually adds to deterrent strength.

Defense against nuclear attack--so natural and seemingly so compelling a goal--has provoked debate for at least twenty years. Ballistic missle defense systems, formerly called antiballistic missile systems, offer the prospect of remedying both superpowers' alarming vulnerability to nuclear weapons by technological rather than political means. But whether ballistic missile defenses can be made to work and whether it is wise to build them remain controversial. The U.S.-Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 restricts testing and deployment of ballistic missile defenses but has not prohibited more than a decade of research and development on both sides. As exotic new proposals are put forward for space-based directed-energy systems, questions about the effectiveness and wisdom of missile defense have again become central to the national debate on defense policy. This study, jointly sponsored by the Brookings Institution and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, examines the strategic, technological, and political issues raised by ballistic missile defense. Eight contributors take an analytical approach to their areas of expertise, which include the relationship of missile defense to nuclear strategy, the nature and potential applications of current and future technologies, the views on missile defense in the Soviet Union and among the smaller nuclear powers, the meaning of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty for today's technology, and the present role and historical legacy of ballistic missile defense in the context of East-West relations. The volume editors give a comprehensive introduction to this wide range of subjects and an assessment of future prospects. In the final chapter, nine knowledgeable observers offer their varied personal views on the ballistic missile defense question.